Archive for April 2009
…unless you disagree with me! Okay, so I usually do my darnedest to avoid news from Hollywood… frankly, I don’t care how “proud to be out of touch”“…I think it’s probably a good thing. We’re the ones who talk about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn’t really popular. And we, you know, we bring up subjects… I’m proud to be a part of this community… and proud to be out of touch.”
-George Clooney they may be. That said… this story showed up at the very top of my Google news feed and it’s got me all angsty-frustrated. Basically, a Miss America contest is being lambasted for stating (when prompted, mind you) that she believes marriage should be between one man and one woman. She made this statement very tactfully, and even said that “it’s great Americans are able to choose one or the other”. Evidently her giving an honest opinion lost her the crown.
When did it become okay to discriminate against those who share a different opinion than you? I don’t care what side of the gay marriage issue you’re on… we all need to work harder to have a spirited exchange of free speech. The power of this country is that we can disagree with each other all we want, yet still coexist in an environment of respect and toleranceMore on tolerance later… ;o).
</soapbox>
It’s controversial, many are up in arms about it, and it’s becoming ubiquitous. I’m talking, of course, about the recent cost hikes in online music. iTunes now sells music at 69¢, 99¢, and $1.29 price points (although you’ll be extremely hard pressed to find 69¢ music… most everything is now $1.29 (up from 99¢). Right on cue, the Amazon MP3 store has followed suit and now charges the same $1.29 per download. Well, here’s my solution to dealing with over-priced music downloads:
Several months ago I discovered that, if I like 1 song from an album, I generally like 2-3 more… and if I listen to the whole CD several times, another 2-3 songs start to grow on me. Considering this, I’ve started purchasing full albums from Amazon. The trick, however, is to purchase USED CDs… which are usually extremely cheap ($2.50 shipping typically dominates the cost). It doesn’t matter if the discs are a little scuffed up… good CD ripping solutions can make use of the data redundancy built into the CD specs and recover from pretty significant errors.
This way, I can get full CD quality music for ~40¢ per track. I immediately rip the CD to 256 kbps M4AMusic compressed with the M4A format is MUCH higher quality than MP3… I consider it a vastly superior file format. files and then archive the physical disc… no need to worry about backing up my downloads. Additionally, if a new file format becomes popular in the future, I still have my source media and can re-rip my collection to stay up-to-date with technology. All and all, a win-win-win solution!
My research group just recently sent an IC out for fabrication… here are a few of the more interesting stats:
- Size: ~2.5 x ~2.5 mm
- Technology: 90 nm
- Components: ~2.86 million transistors
- Team: 2 lead designers, 1 pad designer, 1 undergrad, & 1 advisor
- Sleep: 5 total hours between Wed. morning and Mon. afternoon
All I have to say is, thank goodness this is over… it’s been quite an experience, but I certainly don’t regret the fact that I’ll never be going through this again. 
I was playing around with a Microsoft Research tool (Microsoft ICE) and decided to run a few photos through it from my trip to Highlands, NC. I’m pretty impressed with the results… which you can see in the sweet Silverlight application I’ve embedded below. You can click and drag to explore the scene and use the scroll-wheel to zoom in/out.
PS: My whole photo collection from the Highlands trip is posted here. I’ve also posted my four favorite shots in the “Photography” album here.
